Founded in Chicago in 1860 as Augustana Seminary by the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod, Augustana was created to educate young men for the Lutheran ministry and for teaching, then moved repeatedly with opportunity and migration, going to Paxton, Illinois, in 1863, Marshall, Wisconsin, in 1869, Beloit in northwest Iowa in 1881, and Canton in 1884 as enrollment grew, while the seminary remained in Beloit until 1890. Under President Anthony G. Tuve, who served from 1890 to 1916, the Augustana College Association was organized in 1895 to support the school, and its alumni included novelist Ole E. Rolvaag, physicist Merle A. Tuve, and South Dakota governors Sigurd Anderson and Archie Gubbrud. In 1917 the newly formed Norwegian Lutheran Church in America voted to merge Augustana College with the Lutheran Normal School in Sioux Falls and close the Canton campus, but in 1919 the church reopened the institution there as Canton Lutheran Normal School, later Augustana Academy, a Lutheran high school. The Augustana Academy Association took control in 1932 and continued until the school closed in 1971. Its Old Main building, designed by Omeyer and Thori of St. Paul in the Richardson Romanesque style, was funded by pledges from the Augustana College Association and the United Norwegian Lutheran Church, begun in 1901 and 1902, dedicated on October 4, 1903, and built as a four-story granite structure with classrooms, offices, 25 dormitory rooms, a gymnasium, and a chapel seating about 500 people. After the academy closed in 1971, the building was fully renovated in 1995 and became apartments.